Every Time You Buy Coffee, You Could Be Buying the Stock Too

01 /The Concept

Grifin claims to have made investing in stocks "a surprisingly simple thing to do."

The mechanics back that up. The app automatically invests small amounts – starting from $1 – in the stocks of companies where users actually shop. Not average users in aggregate, but this specific person, which means every investment portfolio is shaped by that individual's personal spending habits.

To make it work, users connect their bank cards through Plaid. The app then collects data on where and how much the user spends.

Once a week, Grifin tallies everything up and buys shares in publicly traded companies where the user has shopped most frequently. The logic is simple: if you grab coffee at Starbucks every morning, you'll be building a Starbucks position every week.

The number of shares purchased for each company scales with the volume and frequency of spending there. Users can also configure the day of weekly investments, a cap on total investment per week, and per-company limits.

For managing the accumulated portfolio, simple automation rules are available – automatically sell shares in companies you haven't shopped at in a while, or ones that have dropped below a set price threshold. Manual pruning is also possible: sell out of any position whenever you want.

Grifin has trademarked the underlying approach as "Adaptive Investing."

The app was first [covered here](/review/prostye-pravila-luchshe-rabotajut) in early 2024 when Grifin relaunched. Since then growth has been strong – 500,000 registered users, with over 100,000 new installs in the past month alone. That's despite introducing a paid subscription last fall: $5/month or $36/year.

Riding that momentum, Grifin has raised $11M in new funding, bringing total investment in the project to $22M.

02 /Why It Matters

Grifin's founding story is charmingly accidental. The founder was in the middle of trying to find a startup idea – without much luck – when he walked into a Starbucks with his sister one morning. The barista quoted her $12 for a drink. She grimaced and said: "For what I spend here every morning, they should be giving me Starbucks stock as a reward." The founder's immediate thought: why can't investing in stocks be as simple as buying a cup of coffee?

The story behind last year's relaunch is equally telling. The app existed, it worked – but the founder decided to rebuild it from scratch, scrapping the conventional financial app interface full of charts and data.

"We wanted to build something that looked nothing like any other financial app. Because we came to believe the next great financial company would stop being fundamentally financial." The insight: most people don't want to deeply engage with finance. Give them something simple enough that investing stops feeling like work.

Better still: make investing the ideal system in the TRIZ sense – where investments happen, but you don't really make them. Stocks get selected and purchased on their own, without the user having to decide anything. That's precisely what Grifin does.

Alinea Invest ([related review](/review/my-vsjo-sdelaem-za-tebja)) raised $10.4M this April on a similar simplicity bet, targeting Gen Z specifically. Its pitch: "we'll do it for you" Each day the app shows the user exactly three stock options. Based on what they buy or pass on, the app refines the next day's selections – something like a TikTok feed for stocks, but capped at three choices. First [covered here](/review/akcii-dlja-umnyh-i-lenivyh) back in 2021, when it ran on a different model. After the relaunch with the new concept, Alinea's revenue grew 6x in 2024, reaching $6M annually.

Back to Grifin – its concept has produced two genuinely interesting side effects.

First, the app drew in people who had never invested in stocks before. The largest user segment turned out to be women between 40 and 60.

Second, the causality flows in both directions. Spending habits shape the portfolio – but the portfolio starts shaping spending habits. Grifin users who automatically accumulated Walmart shares increased their Walmart spending by more than 3x over the following six months.

In other words, owning stock turned into a marketing instrument – one that brings customers back and lifts average transaction size.

Tiicker ([related review](/review/ispolzuj-lojalnost-po-polnoj)) noticed the same connection and raised $10.35M on a platform through which public companies can push discount offers and perks to their own shareholders – on the well-founded assumption that shareholders are the most positively disposed audience a brand can reach. The platform also lets users go the other direction: find companies they already buy from but didn't know were publicly traded.

Stakeholder Labs ([related review](/review/zamahnis-na-bolshee)) raised $4.2M on a similar premise, though so far its platform only runs one-way – helping companies market to their shareholders rather than helping shareholders find investable brands they love.

03 /Opportunities

Stock ownership is a mass market. In the US – arguably the world's most developed equities market by retail participation – only 62% of the population owns stocks. Not because it's expensive (fractional shares let anyone invest any amount), but because a lot of people still find it intimidating and opaque.

Break down ownership by demographic: the highest concentration is among well-educated, higher-income adults. The lowest is among people with lower incomes, lower education levels, Black and Hispanic Americans, younger people, and – perhaps surprisingly – single people.

The point: even markets that feel "mass" on the surface contain segments where they very much aren't. And those underserved segments are exactly where there's room to build something meaningfully simpler than what exists. That logic holds for stocks just as well as for any other market that looks saturated from the outside.

What other seemingly mass markets could benefit from the same kind of radical simplification that Grifin brought to investing – and which underserved segment would you be capturing?

A separate thread: as stock ownership spreads to new demographics, there's a growing market for tools that let public companies market their products and services to their own shareholders – in the spirit of Tiicker and Stakeholder Labs. That functionality would slot naturally into Grifin or any similar app, and it seems likely to resonate strongly with that 40–60 female demographic.